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Samsung bets on BYOD and Knox to spearhead $100bn B2B revenue boom

Quarter of revenue to come from enterprise deals by 2020, says Korean firm

Samsung has announced plans to radically increase its business to business (B2B) operations to make the division account for more than a quarter of the firm's projected $400bn global revenue by 2020.

Samsung's UK Enterprise Business division vice president Graham Long announced the company's growth plans during a briefing, attended by V3, where he revealed the firm has already "grown its UK B2B business from single digits last year to over 15 percent in 2014". Samsung currently lists its UK B2B market as worth £1bn.

Long highlighted the ongoing bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend as a key factor aiding Samsung's B2B growth. He said the trend has helped Samsung find particular success in a number of key markets, including financial services.

"Historically people just viewed us as consumer brand, but recently that's changed. It's an interesting time at the moment. We're being engaged by major banks in Canary Wharf about our technology.

"They know there are three vendors their employees are using. They're using an iPhone or Samsung and, occasionally, maybe one of the other vendors'. They're talking to us because they know our relationship with their employees who are choosing our technology in their personal lives and, by extension, work. [When] wrestling with BYOD, they know they have to talk to us."

Long said Samsung's Knox security service is another key feature driving the firm's growth in enterprise, claiming IT managers have expressed "great interest" in the service's ability to deal with shadow IT environments.

"It's not just BYOD that's a problem, but also bring your own application (BYOA). This is particularly true from a file-sharing perspective with things like Dropbox. The use of these services is a massive issue for IT, It creates a shadow IT environment that's hard to manage, monitor and secure," he said.

"We've developed a lot of security platforms to deal with this; our Knox technology is a big one. It lets employees and enterprise containerise their work and professional data, and we're working with MDM partners to supply the service to enterprise."

Despite Long's claims, it is currently unclear how many enterprise customers Samsung has and how many companies are using Knox. However Samsung told V3 it has sold more than 25 million Knox-enabled devices since launching the service in 2013. One million of these are listed as having the service activated.

Long also said Samsung has inked lucrative deals with key brands including Bloc Hotels and "one of the major catalogue-based high street retailers".